hold!  A quick movement up the water-pipe, and his knee rested on the roof.  The sentry was approaching.  Vassily lay motionless.  The sentry did not notice him, and passed on.  Vassily leaped to his feet; the iron roof cracked under him.  Another step or two, and he would reach the wall.  He could touch it with his hand now.  He leaned forward with one hand, then with the other, stretched out his body as far as he could, and found himself on the wall.  Only, not to break his legs in jumping down, Vassily turned round, remained hanging in the air by his hands, stretched himself out, loosened the grip of one hand, then the other.  “Help, me, God!” He was on the ground.  And the ground was soft.  His legs were not hurt, and he ran at the top of his speed.  In a suburb, Malania opened her door, and he crept under her warm coverlet, made of small pieces of different colours stitched together.

X

The wife of Peter Nikolaevich Sventizky, a tall and handsome woman, as quiet and sleek as a well-fed heifer, had seen from her window how her husband had been murdered and dragged away into the fields.  The horror of such a sight to Natalia Ivanovna was so intense—­how could it be otherwise?—­that all her other feelings vanished.  No sooner had the crowd disappeared from view behind the garden fence, and the voices had become still; no sooner had the barefooted Malania, their servant, run in with her eyes starting out of her head, calling out in a voice more suited to the proclamation of glad tidings the news that Peter Nikolaevich had been murdered and thrown into the ravine, than Natalia Ivanovna felt that behind her first sensation of horror, there was another sensation; a feeling of joy at her deliverance from the tyrant, who through all the nineteen years of their married life had made her work without a moment’s rest.  Her joy made her aghast; she did not confess it to herself, but hid it the more from those around.  When his mutilated, yellow and hairy body was being washed and put into the coffin, she cried with horror, and wept and sobbed.  When the coroner—­a special coroner for serious cases—­came and was taking her evidence, she noticed in the room, where the inquest was taking place, two peasants in irons, who had been charged as the principal culprits.  One of them was an old man with a curly white beard, and a calm and severe countenance.  The other was rather young, of a gipsy type, with bright eyes and curly dishevelled hair.  She declared that they were the two men who had first seized hold of Peter Nikolaevich’s hands.  In spite of the gipsy-like peasant looking at her with his eyes glistening from under his moving eyebrows, and saying reproachfully:  “A great sin, lady, it is.  Remember your death hour!”—­in spite of that, she did not feel at all sorry for them.  On the contrary, she began to hate them during the inquest, and wished desperately to take revenge on her husband’s murderers.